


How It Ends

by mediapuppy



Category: Henry Stickmin Series (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Major Character Injury, Post-TT Ending, Selectively Mute Henry Stickmin, Triple Threat Ending | TT (Henry Stickmin), don't worry nobody actually dies, it's pain time lads, ya'll asked for this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:27:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26958040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mediapuppy/pseuds/mediapuppy
Summary: “Tell me when you’re jumping out!” Ellie yells over the wind-roar.  She knows how to keep the helicopter steady now, Charles has taught her well.“Okay!” Charles laughs, and jumps out immediately.They find his body in the river, and the end begins.
Relationships: Charles Calvin & Ellie Rose & Henry Stickmin, Charles Calvin/Henry Stickmin
Comments: 55
Kudos: 166





	How It Ends

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this to hurt a very specific individual, but also as a sort of ode to one of my all-time favorite writers who has unfortunately deleted all of their work! This is a bit of a different style than what I’ve written so far but I felt it fit the angst just well enough to be accepted, and because the way this past writer wrote just blew me away and I’m still so inspired by them. Bonus points if you can guess who the writer is after reading this!
> 
> This can also be read as a sort of unofficial sequel to [Unspoken](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26381263) but does not have to be whatsoever, but it does reference that fic in just one or two lines!
> 
> Warning for angst, near death experience, and way too many star metaphors. I really like star metaphors

Tell me about how it ends.

The last chapter, the final page slipping shut. We cannot live in middles forever, there must always be an end, just as there was once a beginning. 

The end is not beautiful. It never is. People do not go softly into that poetic goodnight, because the end is not easy nor simple. It just ends and we turn it into something wonderful, something to blunt the hurt. That blood was never beautiful, it was always just red.

An end must always have a start, too. A beautiful start. Written right after the ending. It starts like this. 

They’re in their thirties now. Their twenties passed in the unremarkable way twenties often do: long and exciting then all at once in a blink. Charles gets lines around his lips and at the corners of his eyes, his waist is a little softer, his hands harder, the fingers calloused where they’ve been molded by the controls of a helicopter, and Henry loves everything about him. They drink a bottle of wine together instead of two and mind what they eat, and Ellie calls them old when she’s 29, on the cusp of elderly herself. 

Charles and Henry have been doing this for over a decade, married for eight of those, and it shows. Henry’s not sure where Charles ends and he begins, such a hodgepodge of each other’s mannerisms and tics that even their smiles look the same. It’s wonderful.

Let us count the time. You can’t measure the years in missions, (they’d lost track somewhere between the tenth and the hundredth) but you can measure it in smiles, and laughs, the small nameless moments they all spend together. They’ve had enough to fill lifetimes of the sort they used to build dreams about. 

The thing about time is that it makes you a little smoother too, it wears you down like the wind against the sharp juts of a mountain, eroding it over millions of years. You are aware of the passing time, of this constant wind rounding your edges, but not how you become strong against it. 

Time’s arrow passes by them unbidden now, having smoothed out the rough patches, and now it is a thing that simply happens around them. They all let time happen to them without fighting anymore, laughing away the years, memorizing how to put their hands and feet, going through the motions of flying and fighting and everything in between. It becomes easy and effortless, like following a rope through the fog to find your way home. They know every turn, every texture, nothing surprises them anymore, and they are beginning to believe nothing ever will.

This was bound to happen eventually, but they’d kept pulling on that rope, forgetting that one day it was bound to snap on them.

They are in a helicopter now: familiar ground. The air is sweltering and hot, it beats in through the open side door like the fresh breaths of hell. The sun is high. There are no clouds.

Ellie is at the controls, Charles is in the backseats with a parachute across his back, beneath them is a sea of treetops going on and on until the world curls away from them. Henry is back at base, waiting for his family to come back to him. 

It’s familiar. They know this rope, this game, have followed it for years. 

“Tell me when you’re jumping out!” Ellie yells over the wind-roar. She knows how to keep the helicopter steady now, Charles has taught her well.

“Okay!” Charles laughs, and jumps out immediately.

Ellie does a funny little wobble with her mouth, something that for years had tried to be anything but hopelessly, endlessly fond and had lost the battle long ago. Ellie smiles because Charles lives for this, for the mission and the helicopter still sturdy beneath her feet as she watches him careen down through the air until he’s nothing but a dark speck beneath her. 

She doesn’t realize anything’s wrong until she’s standing at the rendezvous point, alone.  
  


* * *

Animals have an innate sense of the world that is lost on humans. Cats and dogs can feel an earthquake minutes before the rumbles begin. Birds know the slightest change in the air pressure, flee when they sense something they do not understand yet know to fear. For thousands of years animals have predicted disasters before humans even knew anything was wrong.

Ellie doesn’t need the birds and the dogs to know something’s wrong. She knows from the second she steps out of the helicopter into the clearing that the world is not right. Charles has never been late before. She lets the minutes pass. Then lets a few more, just to be sure.

Humans cannot sense air pressure, or smell a drop of blood miles away, or feel the gentle rumblings of the earth before it snaps, but something has kept us alive for millions of years that has allowed us to survive anyway. Perhaps it’s that little whisper in the back of the head, that insistent little voice that tells us if something is good, or bad, if it’s a matter of the brain or heart or gut. It’s that voice that makes humans _know_ in some inexplicable way. A sinking feeling, like a bucket hitting the bottom of a deep well.

Ellie looks around the clearing and just _knows_. Terror rises in her so fast that it’s almost an alive thing clawing itself up from her gut, into her throat, threatening to choke her. Her arms break out in gooseflesh. 

He was supposed to land in the clearing, near the river, between the bushels of trees as far as the eye can see. Ellie and the rescue team search the logs and the branches for signs of him, they beat the ground down with their boots and scrape their hands on vengeful thistles who do not like to be disturbed. The anxiety between them is a tangible thing that pulses inside of Ellie and makes her vision shake with each thump of her heart behind her eyes and the back of her tongue.

Charles is not in the mud, or stuck in the trees, or waiting round the bend to laugh and wave at them helplessly where he’s gotten himself all tangled up in the vines down by the hills. 

But the river.

The water laps at the edges of their boots as they stand there, frozen on the waterline amongst the reeds. It is hot. There are no clouds, or rain, or whipping wind. Tragedies aren’t supposed to happen on days like these.

His parachute hadn’t opened properly. It had gotten scared, stage-fright right as the curtains were pulled. Had said, _oh no not today, loves, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps never, now. It’s all the same to me, you know._

It floats on the surface, a bloated jellyfish sun-dried in the heat, stingers reaching down into the depths of the river, weighed down by something caught inside. 

Her face is all eyes. If Ellie could see herself then she would be amazed at how quickly her face lost color, save for the corners of her lips which had taken on an odd blue. She tries to talk, to scream or speak, she isn’t sure, but the words don’t originate in her brain - her entire body is full of wires slowly twisting on either end, filling up every single inch of her, leaving no breath or thoughts. If she tried to scream now all that would come out is a high, soundless squeak, like the shriek of a dog whistle.

Ellie turns, and turns, the tendons behind her eyes stretched too thin, her stomach full of sour acid she’s suddenly all too aware of, and—

“I threw up. Henry, I couldn’t, I couldn’t,” Ellie says on the phone in between ragged, stuttery gasps that make her voice sound like a record player catching once, twice, three times before skipping and evening out. This is what she says to him, after.

After they rush into the water like a herd of bison. After they pull those stingers from the dark, cold depths of the river to find what prey it had ensnared on the ends. After they carry Charles’ waterlogged body to the place where the reeds are, his blue lips pointed towards the sky, his pale skin warmed by the sweltering sun, his hands catching on the water sausages with barely enough weight to curl the stems. 

After they take turns putting their bodies against his, fists on chest, lips on lips, let me breathe for you, no, let me try, feel his ribs, concentrate on his chest, _try again, clear._

And Henry had known something was wrong the second he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. Intuition is cruel. He had been cooking dinner, chopping the bell peppers into perfect little squares when his entire body froze, and then the phone had gone a second later and Henry had known in such a devastating human way. The entire world shifted on its axis.

He had answered the call so robotically he felt almost displaced by it, as if he was simply an observer in his own body. Henry was out of himself, watching in. He listened to the automatic rumble that began in his chest that let the other line know he was there, he watched how he smiled, impossibly smiled, the cords in his neck twitching beneath his skin. The traitors.

The world becomes faraway and unimportant now. His cells are made of static and flimsy things he had never even known existed until now. His vision shakes frightfully, reeds in the breeze. A gust of wind would have the entire apartment around him crumbling down, bringing him with it. Henry almost wishes for it.

But Ellie is talking to him. “Henry, we’re landing now, Henry _please._ ”

Henry’s spent ages two through twenty-eight chasing and running and running away and oftentimes not knowing which is which, but now he knows. He _knows_. 

He’s running. The wind is whipping through his hair and he’s running. The air that enters his lungs is red hot, it makes his entire body cramp, it threatens to swallow him whole and tear and split him apart from the inside out. His sides ache, his throat is raw, his bare socks beat down on the dusty red ground as he chases the sound of a helicopter’s blades beating over the short white building on the edge of base. 

And he’s running.

They’ve just gotten him out of the helicopter when Henry gets there. The blades of the helicopter send dust shooting out in every direction, his heartbeat pumps in time with them, filling up the whole world, and Ellie’s body feels very far away when she runs up and slams into him. 

But Henry can only see Charles.

They carry him out without a stretcher. He’s tucked against somebody’s chest, a man that isn’t him, a man who doesn’t look anywhere but the front door to the makeshift hospital as he carries this limp, pale thing that only vaguely resembles what a human should look like. One damp arm stretches down towards the ground; dead weight.

Henry had never really believed in being paralyzed with fear. He had never understood the notion, how could you just freeze up at the most important moment? Why don’t you just force your body to move? He has spent his entire life moving towards or away from something, being still isn’t in his vocabulary.

Henry stares, his breaths coming to a painless yet complete stop in his throat. If being paralyzed with fear is truly a thing it certainly couldn’t happen with such totality. No, and not to him. But all at once there’s no contact between his brain and his body. They’ve separated, waved goodbye, boarded different trains and watched the other roar past. His arms and legs are stupid blocks of flesh that hang uselessly around him as the world fills with static and the quick thump of bloody drumsong.

An alert sense of hypervigilance had kept Henry alive for so long, and it kicks in now, up to high gear. Nothing was, nothing _is_ but that arm trailing down towards the ground and flopping with each hurried step . His eyes center in on it, this ancient survival equipment of hyperfocus, his nerves on tripwires.

Ellie is grabbing him.

What was the last thing he’d said? Henry thinks crazily, his breathing picking up as the static closes in on the edges of his vision. The last thing they ate together? Had they made love before he’d left? 

(Someone is shaking him)

They had, on top of the sheets, between them, laughing as they tried to find the open and close of each other’s bodies in the sleepy blue of early morning. Charles was gentle with him, he always was, tender lips and curling fingers against his waist mindful of the sore spots.

Ellie’s talking, but her mouth moves like the figures on a muted television screen. Henry’s aware of that. Ellie is touching him now. Her fingers are on his cheeks, jerking his head to look at her, but his eyes won’t lock. They bounce around crazily in his head, following the man and the arm, disappearing into the dust halo surrounding them. And that is what seems to free him.

There’s a sound then. A strange sound that could not be born from his chest but is rising from his throat anyway. It’s raw and guttural, the most human sound in the world. 

Henry falls to his knees and screams.  
  


* * *

All it takes is a piece of faulty equipment to change the course of their lives in one visceral, violent instant. All of life was created in an instant, and it all ends the same way too.

General Galeforce blames the maintenance team, who blames the technicians, who blame the privates. Round round the game goes.

They’re in the stuffy little office out by one of the tents, the sky outside is the color of orange honey unfurling from a spoon, the clouds are rumpled blankets of purple. It is beautiful. It’s not supposed to be beautiful. 

Tragedies aren’t supposed to happen on days like these. You’re supposed to wake up with an aching feeling that only gets worse as the day goes on. It’s supposed to be raining and windy, or at the very least overcast, the vapors of their breath rising in the cold like their souls leaving their bodies. 

At the end of it all, the sky is nice and the wind is warm. Henry doesn’t understand.

“We got him in just in time,” Galeforce says, voice steady and betraying. His shadow is a long, shapeless thing on the ground. He speaks without looking at them. “The doctors say he’s got a chance, and that’s all he needs.”

Henry doesn’t understand.

“A chance is good,” Ellie is saying now, at an indeterminate point to his left. Her voice is still raw from crying and shouting at him, but it’s there. It’s steady. Firm. Alive.

Henry doesn’t _understand._

How can the storm live inside of him and not outside? How can so much be going on inside of his body yet none of it leak out of him? There are worlds wrapped inside of us, worlds of our own creation and choosing. It is the true cruelty of life to make us keep these things to ourselves, that they don’t fill the entire space and explode out when they need to. That they stay alone, in happiness, in health, and in grief too painful for words.

Henry’s head is high water and deep iron. The world is dancing. His flesh pumps like a racing heart, can be felt in every fingertip. He is drumsong, he is anger so absolute he could strike God with it, he is all vengeance — not for him, but for his husband. For Charles.

His breaths feel like hot liquid screaming out of him, his eyes burn with it. How can nobody see it? Can they not feel the beating of his heart, his righteous anger? How can you feel something so intensely it becomes a tangible thing? 

“We should pray,” someone says, shy, as if they’re not sure they’re allowed. It feels damning.

Pray. They should _pray_. But then everyone else is getting up, shuffling their feet uncomfortably, hanging their heads. He gets up with them as if being tugged along by some invisible string.

Henry doesn’t pray. This is different. He leans down with his hands together, the faces of a book pressing the pages gently closed, his nose brushing against the spine. He counts the seconds, to make it look genuine. He knows the motions.

When Ellie does the same she can see his eyes are still open. Those pinpoint pupils burning into his shoes. He doesn’t breathe, not until he has to. 

Henry is furious, because he doesn’t know how else to be.  
  


* * *

  
  
Henry gets used to the hospital and the waiting rooms. They become his home. The days draw out listlessly, endlessly, never starting or stopping but continuing horribly on.

His new home is white. The tiles are white. The sneakers are white. The gown they put Charles’ body in is white. White coats. White cotton balls and Q-Tips. White smiles that are all teeth. The white popcorn ceiling reminds him too much of his abandoned apartment collecting dust, so he looks anywhere else. Everything is wrapped in plastic.

In Charles’ room there’s a chair. It is green. It has four metal legs and a cushion. It is the only touch of color in a world of white. 

Charles does not talk anymore. The monitors do all the talking for him. Squiggly green lines that beep in strange patterns, the numbers that speak about his blood pressure and heart rate. Henry watches them all, commits them to memory, listens to their chatter on the first night through the fifth, but doesn’t understand them. He’s never been so angry in his life.

Henry feels like he’s been learning wrong his whole life. _Barbiturate coma_ , they tell him. Henry nods like he knows what that means then looks it up later.

Henry looks up a lot of things in his chair, in the waiting room, in the halls, and around corners, eavesdropping on Ellie and the doctors and jotting down the words he doesn’t know but needs to. Nothing has ever been more important than knowing.

Henry’s always wanted to know everything about Charles, after all. 

So Henry reads, and listens, and thinks of faulty nylon lines and hooks in the air, and learns about the missed moments he spent making dinner.

Henry learns they are animals first, people second. A dog is one missed meal from becoming a wolf. The instinct lives deep inside of us, in these pinpoint pupils under a scorching sun, these small canines underneath fleshy lips. We have canines for a reason. Our bodies are meant to hold other bodies, in one way or another.

Henry reads a lot about bodies. 206 bones. 2 square meters of skin - enough to fill a doorway from top to bottom. We are born with 20 teeth and make 32 by the end of our lifetime. If you cut a child’s skull open you’ll see them, hiding underneath the flesh. These canines can slip between wiry tendons and muscle, can snap a finger clean from a hand. 

When they get to Charles there are bite marks on his skin. 

The teeth can break the surface of your flesh but the brain stops it, did you know that? Try it. Watch your jaw shake and stutter in rebellion. Your brain is not the animal, your body is. There is a leash there you cannot see, an intangible string between your brain and your flesh. You cannot misbehave.

(And when they get to Charles there are bite marks on his skin)

Now, Henry reads about the brain. Hysterical strength is circled thrice over in deep black ink that stains the page in necrotic blots. In life or death situations the body, this wild animal, breaks the leash. It runs amuck. It destroys and tears indiscriminately, at the expense of itself. It is no longer a person but an animal, pounds of raging flesh and skin that for millions of years fought to survive at all costs. 

When they get to Charles the parachute strings are still wrapped around his left wrist, eating angry red lines into his flesh. All around them are bite marks, half-ovals of red and purple that not only broke the flesh but seared it frantically. They find remnants of nylon line between his teeth when they get him under a scalpel, the file he steals from the nurse says. 

Ellie confiscates his books.  
  


* * *

Henry does not cry. It’s more like bleeding than crying. When someone cries the tears are forced out of them, riding out on shuddering sobs as their shoulders and lungs spasm uncontrollably. It is awful. This is not crying. This is not a dam shattering under the force of millions of gallons of water, all rushing force at once. This dam shattering, those tears, they mean something; hurt or joy or relief or neither or all of the above. There is emotion behind crying, in the lungs and in the heart.

This is bleeding, and bleeding has always been just red.

Henry bleeds, and bleeds, and bleeds. The tears just leak out of him without any conscious thought, running hot and fast down his cheeks. His eyes are bloodshot - red streaked across them like crackles of fantastic lightning, the flesh underneath them is purple, as if sleep had tried to punch him unconscious and failed miserably.

He has never felt so hollow in his entire life. Time passes, somehow. He is anger sometimes, then he is not. He is grief. He is desperation, bargaining. He is sorrow. He is always there, at the bedside.

Let’s count the days. The nights. Henry can’t.

It’s all white. They blend together, these thoughtless cycles. The days are marked by differences in routine.

Some moments Ellie is there, some she is not. The light coming through the blinds is orange as fire, it sets Charles’ body ablaze in odd zebra-stripe patterns. 

The chair in the corner is plastic green. He knows this. It’s _his_ chair. His weight has made a mold in the middle the shape of his body, his legs know how to bend back beneath the legs, his shoes have memorized the spaces between the tiles. This is his chair, his space. His little dark patch in a world of white.  
  
When it is daytime his chair is there at the bedside, a source of comfort, of familiarity. It is green, the color of dried seaweed, basking on sand as white as anything. Henry no longer hears the cushion deflate underneath him. At night his chair is back against the wall. The nurses always touch it, disinfect it, but are careful not to change it. Not 

(they are animals first, people second. Henry hadn’t meant to hurt her)

after last time.

Henry does not cry. He does not speak. There is no word, no fifty words, to describe what he’s feeling. 

“Good morning,” Charles had always said to him every time he woke up. Soft, white as snow, a baby bird sound.

 _Good morning,_ Henry had always replied with his eyes. _I love you too,_ he had said with the turn of his smile, with the pads of his fingers dancing across skin before they had truly woken up. Charles is fluent in this secret language between them, made up of eyes and fingers and teeth and mouth seldom open. 

Charles took that language with him too, down, down the sky. Into the river. Plunged it into the deep, stolen it, cradled it warm against his chest where it lived tucked around his still beating heart like a lifeline. Without him Henry is silent. 

“How are you?” Ellie asks suddenly, stepping into the room. The door slips shut too loudly. Henry does not see the cautious way she looks at him with wet damp eyes or the way her hands hover over his back, thinking, worrying, wondering; deciding. They pull away without ever making contact.

It is almost dark now. It always is when she comes in. It feels appropriate.

“He’s going to be okay,” she tries again when she doesn’t get an answer, voice sturdy, or at least she thinks it is. “It’s Charles.”

Henry stares down at the space between his shoes, chewing on the inside of his cheek without even realizing he’s doing it. His clothes are baggy now, too baggy. He’s dirty.

Okay? What are the qualifications? Where are the guidelines, the checkbook? How many little boxes does he have to tick off before Charles qualifies as okay? To breathe on his own. To walk. To curl the remaining fingers. To eat on his own, to drink. To make sound. To smile, really smile. To fuck - to make love. To remember us. Henry’s greedy, he wants all of them. How many of these does he get to tick off? How many are necessary to make him okay?

People always say Charles is going to be okay without ever having any idea what okay means. Okay: his confiscated books define okay in a medical sense as Alive. To be alive. To breathe. To pump blood. These are the basics, the bare necessities. They can scratch off sound. Get rid of the fingers, their bodies shifting beneath the sheets. To be alive. To breathe. To pump blood. This is what it means to be okay. By this definition, he is okay, too.

Henry doesn’t feel okay.

Henry agrees, looks at Charles on the bed, and tells Ellie he does anyway.  
  


* * *

  
  


They get new equipment. It comes in big wooden boxes with no return address, down by the clearing in the center of base where they all stand around and open it cautiously. The colors are new, the material is stronger, Galeforce says it’s from some higher-ups then does not clarify. It’s body armor. Hats. Thicker uniforms. Defensive things.

And parachutes.

When Henry's asked about it he merely shrugs, as if to say about time, then leaves without a word.

“It’s been two weeks, Henry,” Ellie says to him, after, following him back into the hospital and down the hall. She’s been more persistent lately, the only one who doesn’t have a tendency towards sad, misty-eyed treatment with him. It’s nice, sometimes. It isn’t nice now. “You need to get out, I think today was the first time I saw you leave since he got here.”

Henry is very tired. He can’t remember the last time he’s eaten. His voice is the sound of gravel under a heavy tire. “Go away.”

The longer he marches down the hall the more the walls and the floor seem to stretch very far away, all sucked back into some vague white obscurity, as if they were suddenly being viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. It’s deafeningly quiet, save for their footsteps and voices. Henry is hyper-aware of every breath he takes. He just wants to go back to his chair, next to Charles, where he can waste away in peace.

Distantly, Henry realizes his throat hurts; too dry. He swallows it down, down.

“Henry,” Ellie says again, undeterred. Her voice is all of the things he wished he was alive enough to feel. It echoes in the silence, this too-big space, the loudest thing in the world. She sounds distressed, but Henry doesn’t understand why. “You’re not okay. Please, come over to my apartment, you won’t be alone. You can have a shower and I’ll make dinner—”

They are all the world is now; existence in voices and drumsong. They are not in the hospital, there are no people around. It is them, in this world of white. The walls are stretching away from them, the hallway seems to go on forever, and these sounds between them are all they’ve ever been. Henry feels dizzy and a bit nauseous. Why can’t he hear anyone else? Did everyone else leave? Did everything else just cease to exist - sucked out from around them when they weren’t looking? Oh god, he wants his chair, please, he wants to be there and nowhere else for the rest of his life, let him be there, it’s all he needs to feel better—

His heart picks up. It hurts. He stands in front of the elevator and does not push the button, too afraid that if he did he would crumble under the weight of his own finger.

Why does having her here hurt so much? Why does nobody else see how much it hurts? Why doesn’t she see that he’s _okay?  
  
_ “—anything you want. _Anything._ I love you, Henry, and I can’t watch you waste away here. Please, Henry—”

She’s crying now. 

He wants to cry too, he’s tired of bleeding. He’s tired of being nothing but an ugly slab of anger.  
  
“He’s going to be okay, I’m going to be okay, you’re going to be okay,” Ellie continues, not quite in hysterics but getting there. He’s never heard her like this before, and it frightens him something fierce. His finger hovers just above the button, shaking. “He’s going to wake up and I - I can’t have him wake up to _you_ , Henry. You look bad and, I want him to be happy, I want you to be happy, let me do this for you, Henry. I want to help one of you, please, _let me help one of you._ ”  
  
All at once, Henry feels pulled out of himself. She’s on his back now, arms around his waist, her labored breaths beating into his shoulder blade through his shirt. And she’s crying. The fabric is damp with her tears. It’s strange, because he’s never seen her cry before. Her breaths hitch on the comedown then ramp back up again in big awful gasps. They shake the world, this quiet world of white and them, crashes down to its very core.

Ellie has always been their rock. Their lifeline, the anchor. Ellie is strong is safe is logical is independent is a thousand other things that cannot be named or placed but inarguably are. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget she’s human and breakable, like him, like Charles. 

Suddenly, like the thud of a boxing glove over his mouth, Henry can see how close to the edge of everything she is. She was in this strange, never-ending storm with him, where the water was so black it had a texture like velvet and there was no end in sight, and, if that wasn’t bad enough, she had been _there_ too. On the decks when the first wave hit, that awful ending wave, that battered the hull and everything fell apart.   
  
And Ellie must think she’s the one that turned them into that storm in the first place. She was the one at the controls, up in the air, watching their world go down, down.

Ellie is one of _them_ , the group that Henry had carved out from the rest of the world so long ago, had told the rest of the world it could look at but not touch, because this was his little circle, his little group, his little family in a world of white silence.

When something happened in their little circle they all felt the effects, but Henry had been convinced he felt it worst of all. The ring on his finger says Charles is his; it has their names carved into the side, engraved in gold. It is an invisible line in their little circle that connects them all, and when that line was suddenly threatening to snap Henry had been selfishly convinced it only affected the two people who had made it.

But their little circle, this private carving the world could not touch, was not made by two. Henry, deep in his own misery, forgot about the third. About their anchor that tethered them back to the world so they didn’t go floating off. 

Why didn’t he see it? Why did he have to be so fucking _scared?_

Henry thinks about Ellie and what it must be like to carry around not so much grief

(she watched him fall)

but guilt, and he feels the air being sucked out of his lungs.

The world smashes back in on him - the telescope being flipped back the right way. He can hear the footsteps of the nurses and the happy chatter between two men down the hall. He stares at the call button for the elevator as it doubles, then triples, through a film of tears.

A sound comes from him. At first he doesn’t know what it is, it seems to come from everywhere and nowhere. It is the sound of an animal with a smashed foot: a whimper. 

Henry tries to lock his jaw against it but it does no good. The whimpering keeps coming.

God, why does he have to be so _fucking scared?_

He lowers his head and wraps his arms so tight across the meat of his body just above the belt that he can feel his ribs bending in from the pressure. Ellie’s arms just above his shake, soften a bit. Henry peels his lips back and snarls mutely at the sound, trying to scare it off.

He stops whimpering. He thinks it’s done. He’s put a cap on it. Sent it running. And then a low cry comes out of him, his entire body shudders with the force of it and folds in on itself. It comes again, that raw, guttural sound, and Henry thinks: _dear god, was that me? Am I making that sound?_

Henry hugs Ellie and, at last, cries.

* * *

  
  
Grief isn’t constant. It isn’t a linear line you can predict. Charles isn’t gone, not completely, but this is bad enough.

They’ve been here once before. It was better, then. 

It had been a close call, their first close call ever, and that night Henry had wrapped his arms around Charles’ sore and bruised body like a life-preserver floating aimlessly out to sea.

“I’ve never been good at being sad,” Charles had said, wobbly lips and wobbly voice. He’s still smiling, despite everything he still smiles, and it is the most beautiful thing Henry has ever seen. “I don’t think I know how to be.”

“Sure you do,” Henry had insisted, his fingers on Charles’ arm, around his waist, reminding himself that Charles is still there warm and heavy beside him. Their rings sat on the nightstand, shiny and new. “Everyone does.”

Charles flipped over to him, cheek smushed against the pillow, his eyes powdered red from crying. Their noses brushed against each other and Henry had pushed a stray hair back around Charles’ ear, let his fingers linger there against Charles’ cheek. 

“Does being sad have to be _sad?_ ” That ridiculous, absurd, wondrous smile, like a flower to the sun. “Okay, stupid question, but hear me out,” Charles paused, to kiss Henry’s nose, “I love you, and bad things happen, but good things happen too, y’know? And when the bad things happen I feel bad, but I don’t really feel bad, because I know good things will happen too, and I’m happy they both get to happen to me.”

Henry stared at him for a long time without saying anything.

“You’re on so many painkillers right now,” Henry laughed, and Charles laughed too, because Henry hadn’t gotten it then, because everything that had ever happened to Henry still had claw marks on it from where he’d refused to let go without a fight.

The tears on Charles’ cheeks, across the forming bruises, were bittersweet. Charles put his hand over Henry’s on his cheek and held it there. “I know, but I’m happy I get to be sad with you. It doesn’t feel like sadness anymore.”

Henry knew what it was like to be sad, because he was so afraid of being happy. Being profoundly happy was terrifying, more terrifying than the deepest sadness, because he believed the universe only let you be that happy if they were preparing to take something from you. Sadness was a familiar hurt, and he lived inside of the comfort knowing that’s what it was.

Looking back on it, Henry thinks he’s beginning to understand. Grief is strange, it is an all new monster of sadness, an evolution.

Henry looks at Charles on the bed, hours after Ellie’s left and he’s run out of tears, and thinks of them together, on a different bed when they were different people, and for just a second, smiles at the warmth of the memory in the dark.

This doesn’t feel like sadness. But it still hurts, so much, even with him.  
  


* * *

Why are our bodies marked only by pain? By injury? 

Henry has scars. They run white lines across his skin, tell stories through the very fiber of his being. 

When you kiss, it does not make a mark. The body is not marked by love.

If it was, Charles’ body would be a night sky of marks. Each little kiss a star, twice against his shoulder, three against his neck, his back a myriad of endless dots. They cluster more violently over the scars. They obscure them, try to swallow them whole with their tiny mouths, work together to blot them out completely when that doesn’t work.

How many times has Henry done this, spent nights tracing Charles’ scars with his lips? His tongue knows them by heart, loves the feeling of dipping in and out, how the skin there feels smooth and strange.

Against a sky of white Henry kisses stars into existence. It helps him forget the hurt, if only for a moment. Charles’ body is hydrogen, Henry’s lips helium and nitrogen, the tension of them together creating something new altogether. It’s cruel. Charles does not speak to him with soft words as he does it, or run his fingers through the overgrown garden of Henry’s hair. The skin is white sometimes, pink at others, grey at the worst. The wrist feels unnaturally sharp against his lips, the dips there too severe, the hair shaved down. It tastes like antiseptic. 

There are two fingers missing on the right. Henry curls the knuckles up against his lips and traces them, memorizes the new patterns of Charles’ body around the white sheets, the white walls, this white world. 

Every inch of skin not covered by white sheets and white gowns is peppered with invisible kisses by the end of the day, then Henry comes and does it again.

Henry eats now, and showers before someone has to tell him. The anger is still there, and Henry is sure it always will be, but it’s not all he is anymore. The days are a little easier, he smiles a little more, makes a bit of an effort when he’s expected to, and some days the nurses will let him sit at the foot of Charles’ bed with a hand on his ankle under the sheets, thinking of stars and all the remarkable years they spent together. He tries not to think about all the years they may never get.

Henry falls in love with Charles all over again when Charles is away, waiting -waiting for better days, for better moments, living in perpetual suspense- until the waiting ends, and tells him he’s made enough stars.  
  


* * *

It does not happen all at once, this is not creation or destruction, this is not that easy. It is healing, and healing takes time.

The first time Charles opens his eyes Henry cries. Crying is easy now, bleeding is hard, and it feels _wonderful_ to cry.   
  
Nothing ever happens like it does in the movies. There is no montage, or fade to black, or cut throughs to whittle down the time of progress. Henry never wakes up to Charles smiling at him over the sheets with his eyes bright and alive, the color back to his cheeks as if nothing had ever happened. The monitors talk for both of them for days too many, Henry can’t kiss Charles properly because of the oxygen, so instead he tells him how stars are made while Charles stares glazed and barely-there at the ceiling. 

But these moments are some of the happiest Henry has ever known, because Charles is with him again.

There are some feelings you will never find words for, sacred feelings. You will learn to name them after those who gave them to you.

Charles is euphoria. Charles is crying, is amazing is impossible is wonderful is strength against the silence is a love so tender and overwhelming that Henry wants to drown in it. Charles is the beautiful start and the hurtful end, and every spectacular thing in between.

After two weeks Charles is damp eyes and a slanted little smile that makes Henry cry every time he sees it, and Charles is also the feeling of a thumb on his cheek, gently brushing away the tears, speaking to him soft and slow like liquid gold around thin plastic tubes. 

And if happiness is a place, it is that white world, where Henry kisses Charles for the first time in what feels like forever, and they bump mouths clumsily, too happy to touch each other properly.   
Happiness is anywhere Henry is with him.

But Charles is also frustration, and silent grief, because nothing is linear in this wicked world.

Galeforce offers to get Charles a therapist to go along with the physical one, an honest-to-god therapist with a degree and the puffy long couch and everything, not the sort of on-base therapist that tells you you’re fine if you’re not bleeding out or missing anything vital.

“What? No,” Charles laughs from the bed, smiling at Galeforce where he’s leaning uncomfortably in the doorway looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. For a moment Charles opens his mouth like he’s about to say something else, but then thinks better of it and stays quiet. His smile warms up the whole world. 

Henry thinks Charles looks tired, perhaps mixed with minor annoyance at having been disturbed, but otherwise fine. He’s smiling, his pink cheeks a wonderful respite in this white world, his eyes bright where they used to be glazed and unfocused like the dead eyes of a fish basking under the sun. He looks beautiful.

It’s only replaying it in his mind later does Henry realize Charles’ smile hadn’t quite reached up to his eyes, he had just been too happy to see the signs he promised he’d never miss.

The days draw out. Henry had assumed that once Charles was awake it would all go quickly, instead Henry lays with Charles on the too-small hospital bed and fluffs his pillows, and pulls the blankets up to his chin, and twiddles away the hours doing small, simple things that feel like anything but.

Ellie gives him his books back and he lets Charles lay against his side whenever he wants, reading the words to him when Charles is too tired to keep his eyes open. They read fantasy books together, creating whole new worlds in the spaces between their breaths, smiling lamely at the awful jokes when they have nothing else to offer.

They watch television together. Ellie comes over some days and keeps them company for a few hours, keeps the nurses and doctors at bay that’re always hovering just outside the door like perched vultures waiting for some delicious travesty. There’s a few scares with the bad days and kisses with the good ones, and the days tick by.

They do lots of things, and say even more.

But Charles doesn’t cry.

They don’t talk about The Incident, the awful thing that cannot be named. It constantly swirls around them, something to be danced around than harped on. It sits in the spaces between their words, in the way Charles’ smile never quite reaches up to his eyes when they’re close to the subject, or the one time Charles had shot up in the middle of the night writhing and screaming and the nurses had been forced to call Henry and have him come in and calm him down.

The next day they don’t talk about it, just hold each other quietly in the warm, relieving rays of morning and let the hours pass them by. 

With Charles against him, Henry thinks they’re going to be okay. Happy. Untouched by the world, invincible against it.

But something always has to give. There can’t be progress without defeat. You cannot know what it is like to succeed until you know the taste of failure. The earth wasn’t built in a day, and even the best equipment isn’t meant to last forever.

The end truly begins now. When Henry is at the bedside and the white sheets have been pulled back. There is no more chatter of monitors and no more green chair. Henry is freshly showered and shaved. There’s a pair of crutches against the door.

Charles is going home today.

“I’m making dinner tonight,” Henry is saying hurriedly, too excited, and his mouth can’t keep up with his brain. He hasn’t been this happy since Charles had pulled out a little black velvet box and asked if they’d like to give this whole marriage thing a try, as if Henry had ever had a choice.

They’d told him on Saturday. Henry had immediately ran back to their little apartment with Ellie on his heels and made sure everything was perfect. There had still been two mugs in the sink he hadn’t washed, too afraid that there would never be two to drink from them ever again. There was still coffee congealed on the bottom. Henry had happily washed them, at last, and placed them on their regular spot on the countertop. The bed had been covered in dust, unused for weeks unlike their living room couch which had an impression of his body across the center cushion. Ellie had helped him shake the covers and clean the sheets, laughing all the while. He got the kitchen ready, the recipe book Ellie had given him three weeks ago already open beside the oven, Charles’ favorite dish circled thrice over in bright red.

It had been amazing, like falling in love all over again.

If only Henry was looking at Charles as he talked about these things.

“Ellie taught me to make pizza! Pizza, Charles, your favorite! I, I still burn it sometimes, but it’s good, Charles, I promise. I cleaned—” Henry continues until he looks up, and when he sees the look on Charles’ face his breath stops dead tide in his lungs, a feeling of sharp needle-prick fright resurfacing in him so fast that the world dances for a moment.

Grief is not linear, or easy to predict. When things break they break slowly, and sometimes you don’t realize they’re breaking until it’s too late to fix it.

“Henry,” Charles says. He sounds so tiny. So fragile. His eyes are red-rimmed and suspiciously wet. Charles turns to him with his too-sharp shoulders, the skin stretched from bone to bone. He’s so skinny now.

Henry is at his side in an instant, the mattress dipping down with his weight as he takes Charles’ hand in his own, a finger on the wrist to feel the light thumps of his heart beating away, just to make sure it’s there. 

(He may of prayed, for the first time)

“Henry,” Charles says again, a little more desperately, and Henry sees it then, just as he had in himself: months of fear and grief and longing and a million other things they had no word for but each other. 

The dam had been cracking all this time, and Henry had been too goddamn _scared_ to see it until it was finally bursting.

Henry holds Charles, just to remind himself again, feeling the angles of Charles’ bones in too many places. “It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m here.” 

So here we are, at the end. Weeks of agony, and misery, and a suffering so great it will never have a name. You cannot name something like this, not all suffering has a name like a hurricane. It does not make you stronger, or make you better for it, sometimes suffering just hurts.

Bleeding hurts most of all. Henry spent so long inside of himself, bleeding red, that he thought he knew every shade of red there ever was. He thought he’d know the signs after spending so long hiding them away from everyone else.

But Charles always finds a way to surprise him.

After everything, Charles cries. Instead of hurting, it feels like a relief.

“I thought I was going to die,” Charles breathes and gasps, his words wrapped around a sob. And he curls in on himself, this fragile, withering thing, like a flower under snow.

Henry had spent weeks revolving his life around Charles and this white world. Weeks of bleeding, and crying, and learning, and thinking. Thinking most of all, of all of the things he hadn’t been there to see.

What did it feel like, to fall through the air, alone? Henry had wanted to ask so badly, around crying words and lips. Were you scared? He thinks of it now, with Charles sobbing against him. Was the water cold? Had you felt it then, or were you gone before the blue touched you? Did you think of me, as I thought of you? 

Charles is all bone and skin now but Henry holds him strong all the same, presses him up against his chest and buries Charles’ face in the soft crook of his neck. His hand is on the back of Charles’ head, his other around his waist, kissing the top of his head like at any moment Charles will disappear. He wants to live on the edge of Charles forever, now and always, in sickness and in health, like they had promised each other so long ago.

Oh Charles, what have you been thinking of alone?

“You didn’t,” Henry manages in an unsteady voice, but he’s crying too. Big, hot tears that burn his cheeks on the way down. “You didn’t.”

“Tell me it’s going to be okay.” Charles is sitting between Henry’s narrow, tight-jeaned knees, his fingers curled frantically in Henry’s shirt. He hiccups once, stops, then a sob rips through him so violently his lungs spasm. “Please, tell me it’s going to be okay. I’m scared, Henry.”

So Henry does. He tells him it’s going to be okay in the three languages he remembers the words for and the two others he kisses into Charles’ skin with hot, teary breaths. 

They hold each other and weep until it feels like it’s all they can do, until it feels like weeping will tear their insides out. But Henry is grateful that they get to cry, and he gets to hold Charles as he does it after weeks of bleeding, because it means that they’re there. They’re real.

Charles is warm, and he is crying. Charles is breathing, and he is weeping. Henry is happy and he is sad. We have always lived our lives in a world of contradictions, and Henry had never really realized until that moment how that could be.

Charles is not okay, but he will be, one day. One day there will be no red even if their nightmares try to convince them otherwise, and one day they will be able to talk about this without crying or shaking. 

But that day is not today. Today they are not okay, but tomorrow they might be, and the thought of that alone will have to be enough to get them there.

Today, they are allowed to be sad because it happened, and because it had just hurt instead of meaning something. 

Henry holds Charles with arms meant only for him, and lets this dam overflow, together.

This time, it truly feels like the end.  
  


* * *

Now remember, there is always an end, just as there is always a beginning, and a middle. And there is always a start, written right after the ending.

It’s an end to the life they’d known, but a beginning to another one. A closing door always opens another, and Henry is thankful every day for the chance to see this new start together.

Tomorrow the start will truly begin, and they will leave this end behind. This wonderful, awful, hurtful end. But tonight Henry is alive and in bed with his husband. It is a perfect night. The television talks to them softly and they do not listen, too busy listening to the tales of each other’s lips against skin, the stories these night skies tell as they kiss new universes into existence. Charles smiles, gentle moonlight in a mass of stars, the force that pulls the tide, pulls Henry closer across the endless miles of intangible mass that kept them apart for what felt like forever.

This end is not beautiful, but it almost feels like it is.   
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Oh goodness so this was my first time ever writing something like this and it was so much fun from beginning to end! Honestly I could've happily turned this into a multi-chapter work and dragged every last scene out (and I may do something similar in the future now) but this was the last fic I had planned since the beginning of it all and I'm so glad I got it out!
> 
> I started writing for this fandom with three fics in mind and this now finishes that out, so if you've got any suggestions do let me know! And as always, come yell about sticks with me on [Tumblr](https://mediapuppy.tumblr.com/) , have a lovely day/night and stay safe everyone!


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